‘X-Men’ TV Series ‘Legion’ Not Set in Film Universe, Says FX

Yesterday saw a bit of bad news for one of 20th Century Fox’s X-MenTV series, as FOX’s Hellfirelost its showrunners, and now FX’s Legion has a minor caveat as well. Progress on Legion has advanced, though the series itself won’t be set in, or connect to the same X-Men universe of the films.

Speaking at the TCA press tour, FX boss John Landgraf teased that we can likely expect Legion to air sometime in late 2016, its pilot already shot with significant progress on scripts and sets already underway, even without an official series order:

We’re quite well along. We’ve had a writing staff working. We’ve seen not only the pilot but several episodes and we’re well in process of casting. I would anticipate that Legion would go on the air some time in 2016, this year. […]

We don’t tend to order series straight out the gate because I still really believe in the pilot process. We really think of it as a series. We’re already in active prep. We’re building sets, and our writers room has already been assembled. … The vast majority of things that we pilot do go forward to series.

That said, the series won’t connect to the X-Men films under Bryan Singer, significantly scaling back the world’s awareness of Mutants, as the franchise defines them:

It’s not in the continuity of those films in the sense the current X-Men films take place in a universe in which everybody on planet Earth is aware of the existence of mutants. The series Legion takes place in a parallel universe, if you will, in which the US government is in the early days of being aware that something called mutants exist but the public is not. I wouldn’t foresee characters moving back and forth because they really are parallel universes.

For those unaware, Legion follows the story of David Haller, a young mutant struggling with schizophrenia and psychiatric incarceration, who soon learns from a fellow patient that his voices and visions may in fact be real. Created for the New Mutants in 1985, the character is also noted as the son of Professor Charles Xavier and Gabrielle Haller.